Using tmux on Arch Linux

Posted on August 7, 2010

I changed to Arch Linux on my Linode server, and expected to just run irssi in tmux as usual, but tmux failed to run with the message “create session failed: : No such file or directory”, which was not very enlightening. Running tmux -vvv to get some debug output wasn’t at all helpful either.

Aha! The /dev/pty* files are root:tty with 660 permissions, so just adding my user to the tty group solved it. I knew it was a permission problem somewhere, but it took a little digging since the error message was very generic.